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Scribe: Analyze This

How an unassuming band of musicians schooled Indian metal in the art of cool

Jul 11, 2013

Scribe is that most elusive of entities ”“ a truly democratic band. There’s no frontman; everyone has pre-assigned roles based on their comfort zones, which maximizes every band member’s potential. So Prashant and Akshay handle songwriting, guitars and sound duties, Vishwesh manages the story-writing with inputs from Akshay, Vaas “babysits the band,” he says, “because we’re all kids and it takes up to 10 calls to fix up a jam, or 10 SMSes to get someone to check their mail.” Viru just comes in and “adds flawless drum parts, no questions asked.”

But for a band that’s sitting rather comfortably at the top of the Indian metal band ladder, all the band members other than Viru have serious day jobs that aren’t just work, but something they’re all as passionate about as their music. Vishwesh is a director ”“ the craftsman behind music show The Dewarists and the fictional TV series Bring On the Night on MTV India ”“ an actor, a scriptwriter, an ad-filmmaker, a comedian, a beat boxer and a voice actor. He’s currently seriously working on a feature length fiction film that is his dream. Vishwesh’s preoccupation with The Dewarists and Bring On the Night, and Vaas’s work on the indie film Greater Elephant kept them busy enough that Hail Mogambo was two years in the making. At the same time Prashant’s work as an environment supervisor in a VFX company is often so busy that he has to bunk in the office for as long as a week sometimes.

Yet, release after release, the band has produced complex, challenging music that pushes the boundaries they’ve created themselves. Vishwesh puts it in perspective: “Since music is not your job, you’re not depending on it for the income, to put food in your fridge or fuel in your car. When that pressure’s off, you create the best music you can, not the best music according to a large demographic. When we started off, we were very committed and there were two things that we knew for sure: One is that we are doing what we love, which is playing music in a band, but it is not the only thing we love.”

He leans forward, eyes shining, thumps the table for effect. “If anything, this has to be better than everything else we’re doing because nobody’s questioning you about this. There’s no client here, there’s no checklist, no approval. You’re the approval! Therefore this has to be superlative, because anything else you make, you’re doing it to get paid. You’re doing this because this is you. The last question you’ll ever hear anyone in Scribe asking is, ”˜How much are we getting paid?’ It’s not that we don’t believe in getting paid for it, it’s just that we don’t depend on it like some musicians do.”

There’s also immense amount of respect for each others’ talent, one that bleeds into the band’s psychology and how they allot space for every member to do their thing. “I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that I’m lucky to play with the best metal musicians in the country,” says Vishwesh. “Sometimes, I can’t believe that I’m in a band with these guys.” Vaas concurs, “These guys are magicians; they can come up with stuff when they’re sitting in traffic or watching a movie. I’d be sitting in a rickshaw with Prashant and he’d suddenly ask me to record the sound of its wheels. Next thing you know, you have a riff based on the time signature of rickshaw wheels. Or Akshay will be laughing with us, and then next moment we’ll get a mail with a new song in it that he’s just pulled out of nowhere.”

No one who knows Vaas as the quiet, unassuming bassist of Scribe, would ever put money on him being the founder of a hardcore band. In his other life, Vaas, is an independent filmmaker and co-founder of DIY production house Enter Guerrilla Films. Though they’ve produced videos for bands like Blakc and Demonic Resurrection and shot shows like Headbanger’s Kitchen, Vaas’s passion lies in full-length indie filmmaking and two of his films have released to critical acclaim: mumblecore project The Untitled Kartik Krishnan Project in 2010 and the crowd-funded Greater Elephant in 2012.

The history of Scribe is convoluted but it needs to be told, not least because it’s tied inextricably with the early churn of metal in Bombay (not Mumbai), but also because so little has actually been written about the band despite their eight-year career. Vaas put together Scribe back when filmmaking was a distant dream. He and former drummer Niraj Trivedi were part of early hardcore act Chaos Theory, which disbanded in 2005 and the two of them wanted to form another hardcore band. “Chaos Theory changed the music scene a bit in those days, because while everyone was playing Sepultura and Coal Chamber, we were playing Hatebreed and Sick of It All,” says Vaas. Vaas set up Hedgehog The Sonic in the lull between Chaos Theory, just so that there could be scope to gig. Vishwesh played guitars on this band. Later in the same year, Vaas set up a one-show band called Parle-G with Bhayanak Maut’s R Venkatraman, Vishwesh and rapper Bijou Fernandez that morphed into Method, which was the key to the sound of Scribe today. “In Method, we’d rap and do Deftones covers that were always sung by Vishwesh, which is sort of where the seed for Scribe was sown.” Then Chaos Theory disbanded and Vaas and Trivedi found themselves at a loose end. 

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